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Working and Writing

Are Americans preoccupied with work? These days, with our volatile economy and unemployment numbers that refuse to budge, it’s no wonder that making a living is foremost in our thoughts. But it’s more than that. Work sits in a prime psychic space in American culture: Doesn’t what you do define who you are? It’s the first thing you’re asked at parties; our leaders celebrate the American work ethic, the desire to “get back to work.” Even though we enjoy downtime, we’ve never been able to fully embrace a concept like the Italian “il bel far niente”—the beauty of doing nothing. Nothing is only beautiful for us if we can schedule it between bouts of work.

But what about writers, whose version of work might resemble “il bel far niente,” except with a lot less pleasure and a lot more caffeine and pulling out one’s hair? Richard Ford writes of his chosen vocation, “Of course, there was the standard dilemma (Thoreau suffered it, too) of writing not being considered as actual work by the world around me—a view I secretly shared but didn’t admit I shared, and in fact worked hard at disproving.” Ford was the son of a travelling salesman, and growing up, his family “lived in a world dominated by work.” Despite publishing two well-received novels, his mother didn’t consider him employed until he was offered a low-paying teaching job—a steady paycheck.

Ford details all this in the introduction to “Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar: Stories of Work,” an anthology he edited that was released this past spring (Jon Michaud spoke with him then about the book and the organization it benefits, 826Michigan). The idea of collecting stories around the theme of work fascinates me; when I think of books about jobs, I see the white-collar drudgery of “Revolutionary Road,” or, even more depressingly, the back-breaking drudgery of Zola’s “Germinal,” where one gets to learn exactly what it was like to work (and die) in the mines of nineteenth-century France (it really, really sucked). But the stories in the book are varied, united only by the fact that their protagonists work—or don’t work, a telling detail in itself. Ford writes that when creating his own major characters, they must have jobs; without them, they don’t seem “round.” He struggles to think of a book where the occupation of the protagonist is unknown, and I can’t think of one, either.

But most writers can’t live on advances and book sales alone, and even when they can, they’ve surely held other jobs in the past. Chris Flynn recently polled a few writers for the Paris Review Daily, asking them about their early forays in the workforce. Wells Tower spent time as a garbage man, working under an incomprehensible but kind man named Puddn’. DBC Pierre scoured Trinidad for the perfect parrot for a soda campaign. Tobias Wolff guessed peoples’ weights at a carnival—and learned the value of a white lie. If these tales sound suspiciously like fiction, maybe it’s because these men are masterful storytellers. Or maybe it’s because a writer needs to do some weird things in his or her life, things worth writing about. Maybe we should quit our day jobs and look for the strangest vocations we can find.

Or maybe not. Last year, Lapham’s Quarterly put out a beautiful chart about famous authors, their somewhat unremarkable day jobs, and the inspiration (and low salaries) they drew from them. Kafka worked as a secretary; both Trollope and Faulkner worked for their respective postal services. Their writing wasn’t mired in the banality of their jobs—so perhaps that means there’s hope for any aspiring writer, even one stuck in an office. I’m willing to bet that Wells Tower would still be writing crazy stories whether or not he’d ridden on the back of that garbage truck.